Deeplinks Blog posts about NSA Spying

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and one of the NSA’s biggest defenders, released what she calls an NSA “reform” bill today.

Don’t be fooled: the bill codifies some of the NSA’s worst practices, would be a huge setback for everyone’s privacy, and it would permanently entrench the NSA’s collection of every phone record held by U.S. telecoms. We urge members of Congress to oppose it.

Just in time for Halloween, the Washington Post has brought us a horror story about U.S. and U.K. intelligence agencies reading massive amounts of private data directly off of the internal communications infrastructure of U.S. Internet giants Google and Yahoo.

The Post's report reveals that the spy agencies tapped into the internal, private fiber-optic links between the companies' data centers. This gave the spooks a view into corporate and customer data moving between data centers—data that the companies likely didn't encrypt because they viewed these dedicated private links as secure. That means that the private communications of millions of ordinary users, both foreign and domestic, were exposed to surveillance by the intelligence agencies.

One of the trends we've seen is how, as the word of the NSA's spying has spread, more and more ordinary people want to know how (or if) they can defend themselves from surveillance online. But where to start?

The bad news is: if you're being personally targeted by a powerful intelligence agency like the NSA, it's very, very difficult to defend yourself. The good news, if you can call it that, is that much of what the NSA is doing is mass surveillance on everybody. With a few small steps, you can make that kind of surveillance a lot more difficult and expensive, both against you individually, and more generally against everyone.

Here are ten steps you can take to make your own devices secure. This isn't a complete list, and it won't make you completely safe from spying. But every step you take will make you a little bit safer than average. And it will make your attackers, whether they're the NSA or a local criminal, have to work that much harder.

Ever since Google issued its first transparency report in early 2010, EFF has called on other companies to follow suit and disclose statistics about the number of government requests for user data, whether the request they receive is an official demand (such as a warrant) or an unofficial request. After all, users make decisions every day about which companies they trust with their data, therefore companies owe it to their customers to be transparent about when they hand data over to governments and law enforcement.